Mr. Speaker, the question I have for the parliamentary secretary is based on his legal experience and from someone who has about 30-plus years of policing experience. We are dealing with child sexual offences. Generally, although not always, they are committed by pedophiles.
To the best of my knowledge, pedophilia has no cure. To the best of my knowledge, all we can do is to empower a person who has this distorted sense of sexuality, shall we say, and give them the tools to be able to subdue it somehow, whether through chemicals or other types of training or education. We know that this takes a substantial amount of time, having spoken myself to people who are trying to working in our prison system to do those very things.
The parliamentary secretary talked about our most precious resource, our children. These are our children and anything inappropriate that happens to them will have lifelong effects on them. Therefore, would mandatory minimum sentences not give the perpetrator of these crimes sufficient time in our prison system to be able to at least subdue those urges, which are totally and entirely inappropriate?